Show-stealing stealth stimulator LoveNuts edges closer to production

What’s the buzz all about at TechCrunch Disrupt? LoveNuts, that’s what. It’s a vibrator, designed to look like a funky nut — and adds the glistening sheen of plausible deniability by pretending it is a flashlight. The company claims it is “ready to rescue a woman in any kind of emergency.”

“What part of the device lights up, Hsu?” “Just the tip.”

“My friend Salena had a problem,” the company’s co-founder and CEO Donald Hsu explains to me. “She lives in the same house as her mother-in-law and was horrified she would discover that she had a sex toy. So she asked me for a solution.”

A bright idea

Sometimes you feel like a nut. (Sometimes you don’t.)

That solution? Design a sex toy that doesn’t vibrate unless you “unlock” it using your bluetooth phone or tablet. Until you do (and if somebody asks) it is just a slightly curiously designed flashlight.

The product offers good vibrations, controllable from a smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth. The company has a number of prototypes that are in the process of going through thorough testing at the moment (now there’s an exhausting job if I ever heard of one) and are hoping to go into full-scale production in the near future. First of all, though, is the small question of money.

“Our next step is crowdfunding. We are trying to decide whether we should do a Kickstarter or an Indiegogo campaign,” says Hsu. He suggests the company will be running a campaign before the end of the year.